In Vice, writer-director Adam McKay launches an attack on the resistible rise of former Vice President Dick Cheney quite similar to the one he launched in his The Big Short, that savagely told dark comedy of scumbag investors who got wind of the upcoming subprime mortgage calamity and made a killing from it. What worked, often brilliantly, for The Big Short works much less well in his slash-and-burn seriocomic dissection of Cheney, teenage drunk driver and Yale flunk-out, who lucked out of his downbound spiral by first doing scut work for his thoroughly unpleasant mentor, Nixon cabinet member Donald Rumsfeld. An apt pupil, the title character learned from the best of the worst.

Cheney, as played by Christian Bale (with massive conviction equal to the massive amounts of makeup), is Cheney as a monster worthy of Darth Vader. The opaque, reptilian Cheney slithers higher and higher in the Washington hierarchy, often by pouncing on the bad luck and bad choices of those around him, and turning them around to his advantage.

From 1975 through 2001, goaded and hectored by his calculating wife, Lynne (Amy Adams, extracting every possible Lady Macbeth-ism from the role), he wheedles and strategizes his way from Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff, to serving in the House of Representatives, to Bush the First’s Secretary of Defense, to Halliburton oil magnate and to puppet master to oafish goofball George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell).

Cheney became the most powerful and destructive VP in our history—well, to date, anyway. McKay uses found footage, harrowing reenactments of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” deliberately surreal imagery, even Shakespearean parody, to rub our noses in how, while Bush II was pretty much out to lunch, Cheney manipulated us all into the devastating, costly, futile Iraq War that has killed 4,000 American troops and upwards of 100,000 civilian residents of Iraq.

While our former VP was at it, he made a fortune on Halliburton oil contracts, unwittingly helped create ISIS and strategized ways to put the president in control of the entire executive branch. Sound familiar? McKay dramatizes—less with justifiable outrage than with frat-boy cheekiness and anything-goes flair—Cheney’s unfathomable, robotic remoteness, icy brilliance and zero-cool lack of empathy, even as he kicks his beloved gay daughter, Mary (Alison Pill), to the curb to advance the (ultimately futile) political aspirations of his other daughter, Liz (Lily Rabe).

The beautifully shot, wickedly conceived Vice is too in love with being droll and cartoony to bother to drill down deep into Cheney.

While Bush II stammered, stumbled and played the fool, he let Cheney run roughshod, leading to the mess in which we currently find the country mired. When the subject of a bio movie is this powerful, still impacting how we live now, we’re hungry to know which impulses drive and motivate him. We want to know what’s his endgame. The beautifully shot, wickedly conceived Vice is too in love with being droll and cartoony to bother to drill down deep into Cheney.

The casting is starry, but the playing is sometimes of the smart-alecky, smarmy, hey-look-at-me variety. Steve Carell is a distracting and disingenuous choice to play the ruthless Rumsfeld; something deeper than smarm and self-satisfaction are required, but that’s all Carrell gives it. Or is allowed to give it. We welcome Sam Rockwell’s Bush II because he’s a comic, good-old-boy rube, but as terrific as Rockwell is, we wish he’d gone beyond comic relief, as welcome as that is.

Christian Bale is something else again. A deeply introspective, often unknowable chameleon of an actor, he creates a scarily accurate portrait of a canny, callous beast. He is the reason to see what is, in the end, a deadpan, savage tragedy of errors.